GRANITE and SAGEBRUSH,
by Frank P.Brackett 'By. Pomona College, throughWard Ritchie Press, Los Angeles 1944, 25/ PP- $3,75.
Frank P. Brackett received his bachelor's degree from Dartmouth in June, 1887. In the same year he became a teacher in the McPherson Academy at Los Angeles, removing to Pomona in January. 1888, to conduct a preparatory school for a college soon to be founded in that town. Upon establishment of this institution he became its Professor of Mathematics and Latin. Later his assignment was mathematics and astronomy (with an astonishing variety of other subjects, as occasion arose), and still later his, work was confined to astronomy alone, until his retirement as Professor Emeritus after some 50 years of service.
Pomona College, although without formal denominational ties, owes its establishment to the efforts of the General Association of Congregational Churches of Southern California. Its founders, for the most part, were graduates of eastern institutions and it was their purpose to establish in their new home a college modeled after the privately endowed New England institutions—Amherst. Dartmouth, Yale, etc.—with which they were familiar. It was to be above all a "Christian college." Incorporated on Oct. 14, 1887, its first class assembled the following September in a five-room cottage in Pomona, with a faculty of three full-time and three parttime teachers, including Professor Brackett. Arrangements had already been made for a more suitable building and its corner stone had indeed been laid, when the college received as a gift a large, ornate, wooden building, an unsuccessful hotel, five miles from Pomona at Claremont, described by Professor Brackett as at that time "not a desert, but a broad plane.... covered with sagebrush and mesquite, with clumps of oak and sycamore and patches of swamp land." This village, much changed in the lapse of years, has been the permanent home of the college.
The history of American colleges (except institutions of large initial endowments and. indeed, some of these) presents much the same picture—high initial enthusiasm, followed by a period of extreme difficulty, largely financial. This is met only by the continuing faith and self-sacrifice of trustees, faculty and friends. In time these efforts may bring adequate resources and an assured position in the educational world. Such has been the history of Pomona. The reiterated assertion of Professor Brackett that it is a "Christian college," a phrase which in .the cases of some institutions means narrowness of outlook and devotion to the religious orthodoxy of its undergraduates rather than their intellectual advance, has never been true of Pomona. Like its prototypes in the East it has changed with the times, not in principles, but in methods, and from an educational point of view it has assumed a place as one of the strong institutions of the land.
Professor Brackett has not attempted to write formal history, but reminiscence—the material of history and invaluable because of the participation of the writer in all the events which he describes. Of course much of the detail will attract mainly those for whom the book was primarily written—the alumni and other friend" of Pomona—but the story as a whole will appeal to all who are interested in the development of higher education in America. The authorities of Pomona, moreover, have provided the book with a format, typography and with illustrations from attractive drawings by Evylena Nunn Miller; all entirely in keeping with the excellence of the text. They are to be congratulated for the publication of so excellent a book.
